Family entertainment giant Disney took a stand, several years back, by not renewing a decade-long marketing deal with McDonald’s and flushing fast food and high-calorie snacks out of its promotional system as the childhood obesity debate raged.
But now, even as there appears to be stepped-up interest from the federal government over marketing to children, no one has followed Disney’s lead. In fact, with categories like autos out of the picture, Hollywood seems more dependent than ever on fast feeders’ deep pockets.
Though the Federal Trade Commission looked at marketing food to kids and recommended self-regulation, a new, more proactive administration could address the issue anew, said Susan Linn, author of Consuming Kids and associate director of the Media Center of Judge Baker Children’s Center. “We are closer to regulations on junk-food marketing to children than we ever have been,” she said. “We’ve seen that self-regulation doesn’t work, and we have an administration now that believes in government.”
Robert Weissman, managing director of watchdog group Commercial Alert, however, said he thinks movie tie-ins with food companies may be tougher to get a handle on, even though the FTC is keeping an eye on them. Entertainment and food marriages have become “so sophisticated, multileveled, robust and intertwined,” that they’re nearly impossible to regulate, Weissman said. “We’d need new statutory frameworks, a more acute sense of outrage from consumers and/or a cultural shift within the marketing industry on what’s acceptable,” he said.
That could be an uphill battle. As the summer movie season gets under way there are a number of fast-food tie-ins, including:
• Paramount Pictures made a three-in-a-row deal with Burger King for its summer tentpoles Star Trek, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
• Sony and BK will partner for the book-based Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a fall release.
• 20th Century Fox just inked a five-picture global deal with McDonald's for family-friendly flicks including A Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, all with movie-centric Happy Meals.
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